This weekend's Group of Seven (G7) leaders meeting in laid-back Cornwall in southwest England may suggest that the world's richest industrialised nations are coming together to save the post-pandemic world. This is a false reading.
The truth is, something more sinister is at work. "America is Back" United States President Joe Biden is there to recruit his European partners to help redraw the world. The cloning of the rest by the West promises to be a two-stage process. The first will place China and Russia in G7's line of fire.
A communique to be issued at the end of the summit today will, in all likelihood, make this first stage clear. As for the rest of the countries that "do not share our values", as one American official at the G7 summit put to The Economist, the firing line will be made clear when the North Atlantic Treaty Organisation (Nato) and European Union summits end.
It appears that the West hasn't learnt the lesson of Iraq. Let's school them. But first, a word from a famous Frenchman, Maximilien Robespierre, who spoke to the Jacobin Club in Paris in 1792 thus: one can encourage freedom, never create it by an invading force.
But Biden appears to be in a hurry to "impose" not "encourage" it. Whether Biden will repeat the foolish mistake of the now-disgraced former US president George W. Bush may be a question whose time hasn't come. But reading the comments of would-be Nato summiteers, they sure point to the West muscling up.
Be that as it may, the cloning of the rest of the world in the image of the West has returned with a vengeance as surely as America is back. Somehow these delusional leaders of the industrial North have bought into American philosopher Francis Fukuyama's idea of the end of history, the belief that the world has reached a stage in time that it is now ready for the replication of the American democratic capitalism everywhere.
We must respond, like the late British prime minister Margaret Thatcher did when she first heard of Fukuyama's expression of the idea, thus: "End of history? The beginning of nonsense." Iraq makes this brutally clear. The anarchy that the US invasion has left behind there is a developing story, as John Gray, professor of European Thought at the London School of Economics, says in Black Mass, a 2007 book about the death of utopian dreams, not unlike the ones being hatched in Cornwall and Brussels.
"The destruction of Iraq will go down in history as the trigger for a Thirty Years War whose outcome cannot be known but which will involve a revolutionary upheaval throughout the Gulf with repercussions in much of the world." How true. Gray offers a symbol that captures America in Iraq: Enron, which vanished, leaving nothing behind.
We can't agree more. Yet, the US and its allies are pursuing their utopian dream of imposing the Western world order of democratic capitalism on the rest of the globe. When the world is one free market, they argue, war and tyranny will disappear.
If this is so, why is the self-proclaimed democratic capitalist Israel constantly engaging in tyranny? To say a free market is equal to prosperity or peace is both economic nonsense and political absurdity. If both were true, we wouldn't have the 1 per cent-99 per cent divide. The time has come for the West to discard the one-size-fits-all worldview.